Sumerian epic and the legend of the Flood
On December 3, 1872, an employee of the British Museum, George Smith, spoke to the scientific community with a statement that he had managed to read an excerpt from the Sumerian epic of the 3rd millennium BC. e. about Gilgamesh, which told the beginning of the legend of the Flood. Textually it was close to the biblical one, but it is 700 years older than it.
The following January, Edwin Arnold, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, sponsored Smith's expedition to Nineveh to find the missing pieces of the flood story. Smith managed to find not only this work, but also tablets with the chronology of the Babylonian dynasties.
The oldest book Slavic text
In 2000, at the Troitsky excavation site in Novgorod, three plaques covered with wax were found in a thousand-year-old horse dung. Similar tablets in ancient Rome were called by the word "cera". Passages from the Psalter were written on the tablets. Three plaques found formed a book consisting of six surfaces 15–19 cm in size. This is the oldest dating Slavic book monument. The next is the Ostromir Gospel, rewritten for the Novgorod mayor Ostromir, where the scribe made a note of the time of writing - begun by correspondence on October 21, 1056, completed on May 12, 1057. Tsera were written no later than the first quarter of the 11th century. Hence it follows that the scribe belonged to the first generations of Russian Christians.
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Runes of the ancient Slavs
The runes of the ancient Slavs were signs of writing, but in the understanding of the Magi, runic icons also had a special secret magical meaning, therefore they were used for certain types of fortune telling (fortune telling on runes) and witchcraft.
The earliest evidence of the existence of runic writing among the Slavs is the finds of ceramics with fragments of inscriptions belonging to the Chernyakhov archeological culture associated with the Slavs and dating from the 1st-4th centuries A. D. For example, the runes were found on fragments of ceramics from excavations near the village of Lepesovka (southern Volyn) or on a clay crochet from Ripnev.
A later group of evidence of the Slavs' use of the pyranic writing refers to the Baltic Slavs (Mikorzinsky stones, discovered in 1771 in Poland).
Rosetta stone
In 1799, on the territory of Egypt, near the town of Rosetta, a unique archaeological find called the Rosetta Stone was discovered. This artifact, made of granodiorite, contains an inscription of thanks, addressed to 196 BC. Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the famous monarch. The uniqueness of this find is that before the appearance of the Rosetta Stone, linguists had never encountered the ancient Egyptian language and writing. In 1802, researcher Stephen Weston first presented an English translation of a text from the Rosetta Stone.
Ancient Chinese Writing
During excavations near Shanghai, carried out in 2006, scientists discovered something that called into question the fact of the origin of writing on our planet in Mesopotamia, as it was believed until today.
Stone axes were found with the simplest hieroglyphs inscribed on them. Later, a thorough analysis of the find was made: parts of stone axes, ceramics, jade, ivory. All of them date back to five thousand years ago, that is, to the time of the Neolithic. These findings immediately postpone the appearance of writing in China by 1.5 thousand years ago (at least). If so, then this means that writing on the planet originated simultaneously in several places.